Notes From the Afterlife
by Sappho's Ghost
Summary: "Life was hard enough before we died." Zombie!brittana crack fic that was inspired by a manip of the leaked pictures from the Superbowl episode. Spoilers for that. Fluffy, gory, ridiculous.


**A/N: Crack!fic born of a manip from my friend Gabby (thatllwork) on tumblr. Ridiculous, a bit gory, and even more fluffy. Just read with a grain of salt.**

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Life was hard enough before we died. High school, parents, cheerleading, glee… it was a chore, keeping it all together. When the plague hit, we thought that all we needed to do was keep ahead of it. Make sure we were always moving faster than the infected. But keeping Brittany's attention was a difficult task, and impossible decisions were made that left us both in a bad situation. Shit happens, I suppose.

I imagined that life among the dead would be different. Incoherent mumbling and slobbering and aimless drifting and lust for brains. Well, that last part is true. But the rest? Not so much. You'd be surprised at just how much brain wave activity remains in the minds of the infected. But there are still the drawbacks of being undead. The smell, for one. And that bloodlust I mentioned. Brittany was particularly taken with that. It hits some of us more than others. She's… well, she's hungry. A lot. And it's taken a toll on our relationship.

Let's just say that she and I have very different priorities now.

Don't get me wrong, I still love her. Everything about her, actually. The way she drags her right leg slightly when she walks. The way she snarls when she launches herself at one of the living. That look of triumph she gets when she tears open a skull. But she doesn't need me anymore. Ever since we were infected, she's become the independent person she always wanted to be when we were still alive. It's a little sad, really, that she had to die to get what she wanted.

We move in packs, we zombies. It's difficult to roam alone, considering how slowly we get around. You might not think there's a lot of forethought that goes into a zombie attack, but I can vouch for the fact that we do, in fact, have a plan. It might not always work, but hey. We're trying.

Brittany became our pack leader not long after her first kill. We'd caught up to a caravan of people on the road outside Lima, and it had been so long since she'd fed that not even Mike, whose muscles hadn't atrophied as much as the rest of ours, could hold her back. The screams of the mothers were bittersweet, if only because we knew what it had been like when we were still alive, and we still felt that bit of remorse for their deaths. That didn't last long, once blood had been spilled and the hunger took over, though. And Brittany had showed us that. How hungry we were. She was infamous for that kill, and anyone who fell into our pack after that knew not to get in her way when it came to finding dinner.

Now, a few towns and several months later, I'm still fighting for a scrap of her attention.

"Britt."

I sit down next to her on the curb outside a restaurant where we've found a group of survivors hunkering down. They aren't really survivors anymore.

"Uhnn," she grunts at me as she takes a bite out of a forearm, still attached to a twitching body.

"Can I talk to you for a minute?"

She looks up from her fleshy limb, a thin line of blood dribbling down her chin. I wipe it away with the pad of my decaying thumb and she grins toothily at me. "'Sup, San."

Her faculties have been fading the fastest of any of us. She's still the strongest, the fastest, but she can barely speak, and it's so bitterly sad, because I miss the sound of her voice.

"I just…" I watch her dig back into her meal, pulling at the tendon from between snapped bones. "I miss you, B. How you used to be. Sweet. Less… bloodthirsty."

She perks up at the mention of blood, cocking her head to the side like an intrigued puppy. Her blue eyes, once bright and vibrant, have clouded, the result of exposure and the lack of a pulse. Her skin is greening more and more each day, much like mine. But it seems like I'm losing more of her than just her complexion. She's more interested in the string of intestine I have in my hand than hearing what I have to say.

"Could you put the arm down for a sec, B?" I reach out to her and pull it from her grasp and she growls angrily, nostrils flaring. I push the body to the side and hold my hands up, showing her I mean no harm. She's glancing back and forth between me and her meal, trying to decide which is more interesting. I wait patiently for her to decide, but do my best to hold her gaze.

"Speak," she commands gruffly, turning to me but keeping the seeping body in the corner of her vision. If she's not vigilant, someone could swoop in and take her kill from her. It's very much like living on the Serengeti in a zombie pack.

"Do you remember glee club?" I ask her, taking her cold, stiff fingers in mine. "Singing? How about singing?"

She's unsure at first, as though she doesn't recognize the words, so I hum a few bars with my raspy vocal chords. It clicks and she smiles, blackened gums exposed. She's still beautiful, no matter the decay.

"What about Cheerios?" I point to the uniform she's still wearing, though it might be a little worse for the wear. She looks down at her chest and again, and she nods.

"Sue," she grunts, pointing at one of the members of our pack a few yards away. Sure enough, Sue Sylvester, gangly and decrepit, hunches over an elderly woman's body as she sucks the marrow from a recently detached finger.

I smile, ecstatic at her recognition of our former cheerleading coach. "Right, that's Sue. Who am I, Brittany? Do you remember who I am?"

She sits silent for a moment, staring at me, blinking. It's there, on the tip of her mangled tongue, and I can see her struggling for it. I want to help her, but the fewer answers I give her, the more she'll retain over time. And the last thing I want to have to remind her of is who I am – who we were – and what that means.

"Brittany…" I prompt her, squeezing gently so as not to break her drying, fragile skin.

There's a hint of something in her dulled eyes that makes me lean closer, hoping that if she can see me more clearly, she might be able to put words to my face.

"Tell me who I am, Brittany," I repeat, inching forward and adding a bit of insistence to my voice.

A smile creeps across her face and she leans in, meeting me halfway. She presses her cold lips to mine and, even though I know it can't be real, I feel my entire body warm with the kiss.

"Mine," she says firmly, pulling away. I see the recognition in her face. "You're mine."


End file.
